Critical Essay by Vladimir J. Rus

SOURCE: “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: A Point of View Analysis,” in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1971, pp. 165-78.

In the following essay, Rus examines some critical perspectives concerning narrative presentation in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, drawing attention to Solzhenitsyn's innovative use of “represented discourse,” interior monologue, and the Russian literary form called “skaz.”

In a very timely study1 Dorrit Cohn has made an attempt to establish the term “narrated monologue” as the English equivalent of the French “style indirect libre” and the German “Erlebte Rede.” Cohn defines “narrated monologue” as “the rendering of a character’s thoughts in...